Research Fellows

Scott Atran
Scott Atran, PhD., is Research Director in Anthropology at France’s National Center for Scientific Research, Institut Jean Nicod-Ecole Normale Supérieure, in Paris. He served for a decade as Presidential Scholar and Research Professor, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, New York; Senior Fellow, Harris Manchester College, Oxford Univ.; Visiting Prof., Psychology and Public Policy, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor; and Director of Research, ARTIS Research and Risk Modeling. Previously, Professor Atran was assistant to Dr. Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History. Atran is a recurrent contributor to the The New York Times, Foreign Policy and Psychology Today, as well as to professional journals such as Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Behavioral and Brain Sciences. His publications include Cognitive Foundations of Natural History: Towards an Anthropology of Science (Cambridge Univ. Press), In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion (Oxford Univ. Press), The Native Mind and the Cultural Construction of Nature (MIT Press), and Talking to the Enemy: Faith, Brotherhood, and the (Un)Making of Terrorists (HarperCollins & Penguin). His work and life have been featured around the world, including a cover story of the New York Times Magazineand by Reuters, AP, Agence France-Presse, Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Time, Discover, Scientific American, New Scientist, The Guardian, Financial Times, El Mundo & El País (Spain), Nouvel Observateur & La Recherche (France), Der Spiegel (Germany), Il Sole 24 Ore (Italy), BBC World Service, CTV (Canada), NPR, ABC, MSNBC, FOX and CNN.

Mark S. HammDr. Mark Hamm is a professor of Criminology at Indiana State University. He is the leading scholar of prison radicalization in the United States. In the 1980s and 1990s he wrote widely about White right-wing extremists in this country, as well as subjects as diverse as apocalyptic violence, cop killer violence, ethnography and terror, and the USA Patriot Act. His books includeTerrorism as Crime: From Oklahoma City to Al-Qaeda and Beyond (2007); In Bad Company: America’s Terrorist Underground (2002); Apocalypse in Oklahoma: Waco and Ruby Ridge Revenged (1997); and American Skinheads: The Criminology and Control of Hate Crime (1993). Professor Hamm received two major grants from the National Institute of Justice: one to study crimes committed by terrorist groups and the other to study terrorist recruitment in American correctional institutions. He is currently working on a study of terrorist recruitment in U.S. and British prisons and is working to compile a database on the subjects.

James W. JonesJames W. Jones, PSY.D, PH.D, TH.D, has earned doctorates in both Religious Studies and Clinical Psychology, as well as an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He is a distinguished professor of Religion and adjunct professor of Clinical Psychology at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, a lecturer in Psychiatry and Religion at Union Theological Seminary in New York; an adjunct professor of Medical Humanities at Drew University, and a visiting professor at the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He is the author of eleven books, includingContemporary Psychoanalysis and Religion (Yale University Press,1991),Religion and Psychology in Transition (Yale University Press, 1996), andTerror and Transformation: The Ambiguity of Religion (Routledge Press, 2002), over twenty professional papers and book chapters. His books have been published both in the United States and Europe and translated in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, and Portuguese. He serves on the editorial boards of several publications both here and abroad. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and in 1993 at their annual convention, he received an award for his contributions to the psychology of religion. He currently serves on the governing board and as the vice-president of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion. For six years he was co-chair of the Religion and Social Sciences Section of the American Academy of Religion. He also maintains a private practice as a clinical psychologist. His recent book is Blood That Cries From the Earth: The Psychological Roots of Religious Terrorism (2008 by Oxford University Press). Dr. Jones has been invited to lecture in Europe and the United States on the psychological roots of religious terrorism.

Robert Jay Lifton
Robert Jay Lifton is a visiting professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and Cambridge Hospital and a former distinguished professor of psychiatry and psychology at the Graduate School University Center and director of The Center on Violence and Human Survival at John Jay College of Criminal Justice at The City University of New York. He had previously held the Foundations’ Fund Research Professorship of Psychiatry at Yale University for more than two decades. He has been particularly interested in the relationship between individual psychology and historical change, and in problems surrounding the extreme historical situations of our era. He has taken an active part in the formation of the new field of psychohistory. Since mid-1995, he has been conducting psychological research on the problem of apocalyptic violence, focusing on Aum Shinrikyo, the extremist Japanese cult which released poison gas in Tokyo subways. His book, Destroying the World to Save It: Aum Shinrikyo, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism was published by Metropolitan Books in October, 1999. His writings on Nazi Doctors (on their killing the name of healing) and the problem of genocide; nuclear weapons and their impact on death symbolism; Hiroshima survivors; Chinese thought reform and the Chinese Cultural Revolution; psychological trends in contemporary men and women; and on the Vietnam War experience and Vietnam veterans, have appeared in a variety of professional and popular journals. He has developed a general psychological perspective around the paradigm of death and the continuity of life and a stress upon symbolization and “formative process,” and on the malleability of the contemporary self. Recent books include Hiroshima in America: Fifty Years of Denial, (Putnam and Avon Books, 1995) (with Greg Mitchell) which explores the impact of Hiroshima on our own country; andThe Protean Self; Human Resilience in an Age of Fragmentation, (Basic Books, 1993) which describes the contemporary “protean” self and its expressions of fluidity and change as its possible relationship to species consciousness and a “species self” (related importantly to one’s connection to humankind).

Martin A. Miller
Martin A. Miller, Ph.D. is a professor of history, as well as Slavic and Eurasian languages, at Duke University. He received his B.A. in philosophy from University of Maryland. His M.A. and Ph.D. in European and Russian history, respectively, were earned at the University of Chicago. He was also a fellow in the Psychiatric Epidemiology Training Program at Columbia University Medical Center, and the School of Public Health. He has been a visiting professor at prestigious institutions of higher learning around the globe. He has been published extensively on the subjects of terrorism, Russian history, and psychoanalysis, and particularly, intersections of the three.

Jessica SternJessica Stern an Advanced Academic Candidate at the Massachusetts Institute of Psychoanalysis and a Fellow at Hoover Institution. She is also a member of Hoover Institution’s Task Force on National Security and Law. Stern taught at Harvard University from 1999-2010. She is the author ofDenial: A Memoir of Terror, selected by the Washington Post as a best book of the year; Terror in the Name of God: Why Religious Militants Kill, selected by the New York Times as a notable book of the year; The Ultimate Terrorists; and numerous articles on terrorism and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an Erik Erikson Scholarship in 2009, and has been awarded residencies at Yaddo and MacDowell Artists’ Colonies. She served on President Clinton’s National Security Council Staff in 1994-95. Stern was selected by Time Magazine in 2001 as one of seven thinkers whose innovative ideas “will change the world.” Stern advises a number of government agencies on issues related to terrorism and has taught courses for government officials. Stern is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations. She was named a Council on Foreign Relations International Affairs Fellow, a National Fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, a Fellow of the World Economic Forum, and a Harvard MacArthur Fellow. Stern earlier worked as an analyst at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. She has a bachelors degree from Barnard College in chemistry, a masters degree from MIT in technology policy, and a doctorate from Harvard University in public policy.

Carlo Strenger
Dr Carlo Strenger is an existential psychoanalyst and philosopher who currently serves as the Chair of the Clinical Graduate Program in the Department of Psychology at Tel Aviv University in Israel. He has lectured on numerous topics throughout his career, including teaching a course exploring the psychodynamics of the Middle Eastern Conflict and another entitled Is the West Losing the War of Ideas? Dr Strenger is also a member of the Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism of the World Federation of Scientists, the Institute for Existential Psychoanalysis in Zurich, the Scientific Board of the Sigmund Freud Foundation in Vienna, while being a Consulting Editor for the International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Research. He has written a number of papers and books, including Israel: Einfuhrung in ein schwieriges Land, The Designed Self, and The Fear of Insignificance: Searching for Meaning in the Twenty-first Century, which has been translated into several languages. In addition, he is the author of the blog, Strenger than Fiction, which focuses on Israeli politics as well as the conflict in the Middle East, and has written for the New York Times, the Huffington Post and Foreign Policy. He has also been interviewed by Time Magazine and The Wall Street Journal and has been invited to speak at conferences all over the world.

Research Fellows

Kelly A. Berkell
​Kelly A. Berkell is an attorney and a Research Fellow at the Center on Terrorism at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. She has worked in regional politics, including as legislative counsel to a New York State Assembly Member and as Policy Director to a candidate for Westchester County Executive. Most recently, Kelly served as National Security Fellow at Fordham Law School’s Center on National Security, where she focused primarily on evolving cyber threats. A graduate of NYU School of Law and Barnard College, Kelly practiced securities and corporate litigation in Manhattan and Boston before moving into the public sector. She has served on the boards of various not-for-profit, community, and advocacy organizations.

Richard D. Davis
Richard Davis is the CEO and Managing Senior Fellow of Artis International. Artis is an interdisciplinary scientific field research and development institution working with various governments, NGOs, universities and private sector entities in conflict resolution and mitigation efforts across the globe through four centers: 1) Field Based Conflict Research, 2) Energy & Natural Resources, 3) Cyber Defense and 4) Health & Medicine. Artis also engages country entry and operations risk where ‘Devoted Actors’ influence political outcomes and capital markets. Further, the institution is engaged in conflict resolution work between antagonists in various conflicts. Richard holds several active appointments which include: Founding Fellow, Centre for the Resolution of Intractable Conflict, Harris Manchester College, University of Oxford; Senior Research Fellow, Centre for International Studies, Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Oxford; Associate Member, Permanent Monitoring Panel on Terrorism, World Federation of Scientists; Chairman, Phoenix Investments; and Chairman, Grand Canyon Bank (proposed).

Prior, Richard was the President and CEO of Davis Energy, a company acquired by ARTIS in 2012. Davis Energy was a research and consulting firm for public and private sector clients on emerging markets, financial sustainability, energy development – including alternative fuels and the global use of fracking, U.S. policy and capital markets, including bond financing and U.S. and EU government securities. Richard served at The White House as the Director of Prevention (terrorism) Policy on the Homeland Security Council. Prior, he was the Director of the Task Force to Prevent the Entry of Weapons of Mass Effect and the Director of the Academe, Policy and Research Senior Advisory Committee for Secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff at the United States Department of Homeland Security.

Richard has been a Senior Policy Fellow at RTI international, a Senior Associate at the Center for the Study of the Presidency and Congress, led a non-profit international development organization dedicated to the education of youth and conflict mitigation, and served as a Trustee for Hope International University. He began his professional career as a teacher, later becoming a school administrator. During his days as an educator, he was also a collegiate soccer coach, holding a national coaching license. Richard has a PhD from the London School of Economics; an MPA from Harvard University; an MA from the Naval War College; and an MA from Azusa Pacific University. He holds Baccalaureate Degrees in Finance and Social Science from Hope International University.